Hope everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day and aren’t hungover or anything. The new cat scarfed down half a pound of leftover corned beef and slept for 20 hours straight.
Ah, yes, totally legit I’m sure
Putin scores a resounding win, but what’s next for Russia?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/17/europe/russia-putin-election-win-analysis-hnk-intl/index.html
Yikes
Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election and claims ‘Biden beat Obama’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/17/trump-verbal-gaffes-ohio-rally-bloodbath
Gotta keep an eye on your local elections. I’ve got that Bethany Mandel running for my county’s school board…
The education of a true believer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/17/patriot-academy-biblical-citizenship-school-board/
Sprots!
Jessie Diggins is a U.S. cross-country ski powerhouse after 2nd World Cup win
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/17/1239074178/jessie-diggins-cross-country-skiing-world-cup-win
Stonks!
Stock futures climb as investors await fresh Fed guidance: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/17/stock-futures-are-little-changed-as-investors-await-fresh-fed-guidance-live-updates.html
IDK this is so quaint, and filled with good advice:
Have a great day!
That “how to use a computer” guide reminded me of when sites had AOL keywords (I think they were called.) So the New York Public Library wasn’t nypl.org. No, you’d go into your AOL browser and type something like hpps://d4hh89l
This led to the creation of a relic I so wish I had purchased and squirreled away: this kind of printed yellow pages guide to AOL. Pages and pages and pages of things and how you could get to their websites via AOL.
Speaking of relics, I am one. I had a “work-wife” who embraced every kind of tech, especially social media, the moment it was released. For all I know she was at Mark Zuckerberg’s elbow when Facebook launched. And that used to be invitation only, hard as it is to imagine that. She invited me to join Friendster, but I declined.
But one of the best things she did was to invite me to get a gmail account when it was in its beta stage. The way it worked then was, you chose a username. If someone had already grabbed it you tried again. You got three chances. After that you were presented with five choices, and you had to pick one. That’s why my gmail address is a slight variation of my name. It can be a pain in the neck because the variation is subtle, so when someone asks for it I have to repeat myself and ask them to repeat it back to me, but it has probably spared me a universe’s worth of spam emails.
I was an early AOL adopter and got a very short email that’s a variation of my name, too. We use it as the “house” email, that you plug in when you’re asked to supply an email at a grocery store or whatever. It’s easy to type in or tell someone.
Back when I had an iPhone, I used it for my iTunes account. I had to go to the Genius Bar at one point and rattled it off to the “genius.” He stared at me for about 10 seconds and, awestruck, said, “That’s a very old email.”
Yes. Yes, it is.
As one of Anne Rice’s vampires who’s been around for centuries, longevity has its benefits. When I had to swap out my dead phone I asked the…he seemed like a teenager…whether my bill would go up. He looked it up. “It shouldn’t…” Then he said, “I have never seen a contract with a monthly payment this low. You chose us as a provider in—”
“That’s immaterial. As long as I can keep that rate.” And then Better Half helped me to my feet and I rollated onto the sidewalk where we summoned an Uber.
I had something similar happen at my bank. My mom opened my first account technically when I was in utero. Then that bank was bought out in the late 90s, but I am still with that entity, so I have had accounts longer than most of their employees have been alive. I got some letter about a new “maintenance fee” and I went “surely the fuck not” and called. They waived it (and have ever since) because I have been a customer since the Pleistocene Era. SOMETIMES longevity helps. Sometimes 😀
I still use my original AOL email for a lot of emailing. I wasn’t even self-conscious about it until recently (past couple of years) when some online articles made a big deal about what your domain was on a resume? Like I get not having xXaliengrrrrl69Xx@aol dot com on your resume, but literally who cares about the stuff after the @? I also have a gmail and I hate the interface. It feels like more generational nonsense.
That’s actually true, according to some jobhunting experts. I researched it extensively during one of my periods of unemployment, and it let me to stop using my aol.com address for professional reasons. Basically, they said an old email domain like that dates you and your resume gets weeded out before they even talk to you. Of course, once they meet me in person they realize that I’m older, but most people assume I’m at least 10 years younger than I actually am. Plus I’ve got a certain set of skills that youngsters don’t ever learn now. So I talk my way around that. But an old email domain can get your resume scrapped before anyone sees it.
Eh, my college grad date and the fact that I’ve worked for the same company for 20+ yrs probably also date me.
True, but you don’t have to put your graduation dates. Just the degree and the university. I’m “lucky” again in that my graduate school was 10 years after my undergrad, so even if I put the date on, I can still “pretend” to be younger. Plus I had a kid late in life, so if I talk about her age and the fact she’s in college, that also skews perceptions. People don’t discriminate too much against employees in their 40s or 50s but once you move past that, they pretty much don’t want anything to do with you.
I’ve spent a LOT of time figuring out all the angles, obviously. It still doesn’t prevent age discrimination, but I face less than my contemporaries do (literally — I’ve got friends my exact age who tell me horror stories). I have a few horrors of my own, but I learned to stop trying to get into “young” companies after a couple of disastrous interviews. Literally, the interviewers were pretty much speechless upon meeting me. I understood why because everybody at the company was in their 20s.
…if we knew then what we know now…I think less people would have been in a rush to get my.name@easytoremember.com…a bunch of money changed hands to get what are now spam-magnets of dizzying proportions…& much as I tend to think moderators are up there in the thankless task department…the people who have to try to stay ahead of the email spam arms race are another bunch of largely unsung heroes with a sisyphean task…so you might have been ahead of the curve with the variant spelling, there…although…YMMV?
…don’t think I recall it being referred to as beta but I’m pretty sure the first account I had with google was an invite/referral thing sufficiently early doors to get the first thing I typed in…which hadn’t been the case with whatever other email accounts I’d accrued at that point & was one of several relative advantages the gmail version had over others so for a fair while that was…give or take work-specific mailboxes…pretty much the default
…a while later they let people sign up with .co.uk addresses & not .com…& apparently gave out duplicates of the handles the other side of the @…& then they started getting into providing the backend of email for other domains…& by that point the amount of times I’ve been sent someone else’s messages was a thing I’d lost count of…no amount of trying to notify them about it seems to make any difference & so far all I’ve been able to figure out is that sometimes the system apparently ignores differences like punctuation marks in the name…or variant spellings of the words…& sometimes the domain is completely different when, say, you have a legacy email provider like an ISP that went bust so there’s a permanent re-direct at the domain level to google’s mail-servers
…the frequency of the miss-deliveries fluctuates so I assume they do in fact know about it but it always surprises me when I see one I remember…there’s a couple on another continent who bought a car & didn’t get any of their paperwork until I forwarded it through some years back so when it’s their mail I do tend to check it isn’t something like a hospital appointment…but whatever special sauce there is in the spam-filters these days it’s a lot harder to tell the difference between those & opportunistic scam/spam stuff so I tend to leave looking at it until I can do it in a browser rather than an app & have a look at the headers before deciding whether to punt it into spam…but it’s always tended to make me view “free” email as fallible from a privacy point of view
…& that’s before you get to the thing I’ve seen someone get screwed by where some asshole manages to insert themselves between the servers & the recipient…so they can take a genuine (& substantial) invoice from a real company & edit the details to redirect the payment to an account they control before letting it reach the intended destination
…in a weird way it makes me nostalgic…sort of…it’s not that interception & or fraud is a thing the royal mail is immune to…or was when I was young & dinosaurs roamed a pre-internet world…but back then the “royal” bit of royal mail had the quaint feature that between putting a thing in the post & it being delivered it was deemed to be the property of the crown…so fucking with it came with consequences+ compared with the same crime involving not-the-post
…still…last I heard use of the actual royal mail has dropped off to such extent that postage is way more expensive than you can explain with inflation & they’re still having to do deals with 3rd party delivery firms to use post offices as pick-up points for internet orders just to keep the doors open…so if the markets determine the value of things…mostly that’s a difference without a distinction at this point?
We just got a postcard from the UK, granted, “airmail,” and it had a King Charles III profile stamp, and it was the equivalent of $3. And it arrived about a month after it was posted, although God knows that was probably on our end.
…it’s a little nuts…someone a while ago told me the best “investment” they’d made in years was buying a bunch of stamps…I’m not sure when, exactly…but after they stopped putting the price on & started just saying “1st” or “2nd” class…& they spent what at first sounded like a ludicrous sum…hundreds of pounds…but when they started to insist on the new ones that come with a sort of QR-code bit…they still had enough left to make it worth going to a post office to exchange them…at a point when they still hadn’t used up all the stock with liz’s head on…so it’s interesting you managed to get charlie…in any case they hadn’t figured out the incremental RoI but they did figure out that the 1:1 exchange when it was done was a 400%+ increase in face value…& the rates have gone up at least once since then
…either way…post going either way between the US & the UK is a bit of a horror-show these days compared to the relatively predictable schedule that used to operate when I was a kid…if I think about it too long I start feeling like I’m mourning the pony express or something equally anachronistic…but when airmail meant those onion-skin blue things that folded into themselves to be their own envelope & needed to be opened carefully to preserve the contents I can remember receiving a reply to a reply I mailed with all three fitting into a two-week window…which might have been lucky but was comparable with things posted between europe & the UK…but a parcel…like sending a gift for christmas or something…that took 2-3 weeks iirc
…it’s probably the rose-tinted spectacles…but I have a sneaking suspicion that in its heyday the royal mail ran a logistical operation that would have boggled the minds of your amazons & fed-exes & DHLs who’d swear blind you couldn’t achieve it without computers & automation?
It was actually kind of Proustian. What the madeleines were to to him, the little blue stickers with “Par Avion” are to me. I sent HUNDREDS of letters and postcards. Pre-EU. Pre-Internet.
I send holiday cards to 20 or so US states and four international countries (and I mail them the last week of November to avoid the rush). I have a tally going at work for arrival date. Last year two cards sent to the same address in Oregon arrived a month apart; cards in areas of my home state took longer to arrive than did cards to Alaska. There is no rhyme nor reason for the delivery times. And the UK has now overtaken Spain to earn the top spot in slow mail delivery. But, as Cousin M said, it probably an us thing, not a them thing re delivery.
The UK thing could be related to Brexit, certainly.
Do you mean something like this?
For what it’s worth if we’re talking about relics, my main e-mail address is still the descendant of the one I used to forward the e-mail from my university account for the year I was in Spain. That one, in turn, was from a search engine over that I preferred Yahoo! or AltaVista and also came with the recommendation over ICQ from a guy I’d originally met in one of the old WBS chat rooms. (He’d probably have been called an “edgelord” or something now, but he seemed reasonable enough to get along with.)
I’d already had it for more than a decade by the time I finally got a gmail address (which I supposedly needed in order to use the smartphone that I also finally got), and to this day, when I give it to someone, I have to place equal emphasis on spelling out the domain name as I do on spelling out my last name – or even more so, since if they’re talking to me, chances are that they already know the latter anyway.
That is exactly what I mean, bless you. I can’t believe it’s only going for $3. I never go on ebay, I have enough crap, but maybe I should…
You definitely should, yeah. I mean, $3? That’s like the Manhattan version of free!
Good old eBay, where the shipping costs more than the product. That’s how they get you. In this case, it adds up to under 10$ which is less than the cost of a banana.
Shocking! Mike Pence declines to endorse person who wanted him killed: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pence-wont-endorse-trump/
Now this did get some coverage, but it seems odd that it was not on the front page of any major newspaper this weekend. Imagine if any Democrat, anywhere, said he or she was out on Biden, the NYT would have 2 days worth of front-page stories. Even if it was someone like noted Republican Joe Manchin or even a low-level but well-known type like AOC, it would be huuuuuge news. And if Obama said such a thing? That would lead to a banner headline larger than what was used for Pearl Harbor on A1 of the Times for like a week.
But apparently the former vice president is too minor a functionary to take note of being out on the whole thing. Ah, well, nevertheless …
Over and over again, the instant you do this kind of thought experiment about supposedly “objective” judgments in the press, you get this kind of madness.
It’s obvious that they have already come to conclusions that they somehow consider objective and then mangle objective reality in ways to fit the conclusion. “The economy is bad” therefore a massive recovery from four years ago must be changed into a vibe story where reporting on actual facts have to be put through a subjective lens in order to be objective.
The execs have swallowed so much Kool Aid that critics of this are somehow the ones fighting objectivity – the more people point out the bias, the more they cling to the slant.
…it’s just speculation on my part…but I think the filter they adopt that queers the pitch over time is a sort of fuzzy-edged window of “relevance”…stuff right in the middle is “breaking news” & it doesn’t matter when the thing actually happened anything & everything however tenuous is fair game for being considered “relevant”…under those circumstances the field is awash in other coverage of the same thing so you’re trying to differentiate yours…& the triangulation on that covers the spread from your bedbug-bret to your b- boy bouiebaisse…or piers morgan through john crace…or whatever…but as you move from the foreground to the background it loses focus…& pence is basically yesterday’s news…he’s not “the ex-VP of MAGA”…he’s damaged goods…a has-been…yadda yadda…what he says &/or does is footnote-order not headline-worthy
…or…to put it another…equally florid & arguably pointless way…it isn’t true of all of them…but in aggregate terms a lot of journalism is sort of telling you all about what it’s like to be riding high on the crest of a constantly breaking wave like some sort of long-board maestro @loveshaq could name without needing to think about…while what a fair few of us would like is a geological assessment of the underlying topology & the variables that indicate patterns like tides & currents & dramatic weather events?
One thing that drives me crazy is that press denies how much they are creating the waves they ride on.
A surfer can’t turn a little blip on the ocean into a 50 foot wave, but a couple of editors who have handed the decision making centers of their brains over to GOP consultants can turn a small story like Biden’s age into a full campaign.
We live in a world with a surplus of big, engaging stories. Editors have enormous leeway over what gets airtime and headlines. But they constantly act like they are objectively measuring waves and then riding them, as if everything is Covid or January 6.
But something like Biden’s age isn’t an issue that is remotely close to 1/6 unless they both make it an issue and pretend like it’s not artificially amplified. If they admitted their role, it would be impossible to sustain.
…to abuse my analogy a little further…if chaos theory has it that sometimes a butterfly flaps its wings & on the other side of the world there’s a tsunami…it’s a curious blind-spot in a profession which lusts after spotting the butterfly & if at all possible getting a picture of it as the wings are in motion…that they don’t consider what becomes of the ripples when they cast their stones…fluid mechanics has some remarkable mechanisms…but in terms of the waters of the press…some of the ones that spring to mind are reciprocation & the phenomenon of standing waves…which give the appearance of holding a static position even though all waves “move” while the water doesn’t move the way it look…& in combination can have a sort of amplifying effect on the peak/trough distance
…that’s a lot of heavy weather for other sorts of news to make headway against when it comes to breaking through to widespread attention…but also to some degree not a thing that an individual journalist is going to feel like they have a causal relationship with…to them it’s just the ambient environment & all their attention is on not wiping out as they ride the tidal wave…it’s famously difficult to see the intensely subjective in objective terms & although that’s part of the job description they tend to have largely based their coping mechanisms for that on the same received wisdom as their colleagues…it’s easy to spot when it’s on the ends of the spectrum but it can get murky in the middle ground?
Bonga Perkins is his name!
Yeah, I think to answer both this and @bluedogcollar‘s reply: The media is very good at breaking news stories (This thing just happened!) and quite good at following up on those (This caused this thing that just happened!) and reasonably good at taking those followups a little deeper (Why did so-and-so do the thing that caused the thing that led to this thing that happened?) but absolutely atrocious if the story is a slow-moving, long-term sort of thing.
To a point, I understand it because a) journalists are not just trained to say “Well, Boeing’s problem is it let the bean-counters and not engineers build planes” without a level of sourcing that’s almost impossible to clear within a timeframe making the story worthwhile* and b) journalists are trained that tension is an important part of a good news story and thus he said/they said is the quickest, easiest way to build that in. And not to blame the reader here, but the reality is that news — especially now — is put in front of consumers in the same forms and places as their entertainment is, and so the competition for eyes/time/brain space is stiffer than ever. Thus you fall back on “good stories have tension” and that is true — but it’s also a sure-fire way to never do the nuts-and-bolts story. It’s easy for the local paper to do a big, blaring headline when the city is facing a fiscal crisis cause the water pipes are bursting and have to be replaced ASAP. But if the paper never once covered the pipes prior to them bursting, did they not kinda miss the story? And there are a million stories like that, both local and national — climate change being probably the biggest and best example.
Then to the second point which is that any good newspaper editor is well aware of placement mattering for a story. I’ve been a part of hundreds — probably even thousands — of meetings over the years about what’s going on the front page, and even in the internet era, what’s going in the main story spot. The people on the NYT politics desk are simply lying when they pretend otherwise, and they either know it (and want it) or are under orders to do it.
* – this is a classic journalism problem too because “old news” is considered the very worst possible thing, so really big things that take time to be sourced properly end up in books that most people don’t read. It’s how you get things like people calling the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit “frivolous” for years when if you actually know the story, it’s about as un-frivolous a consumer protection case as you can imagine!
One thing I would argue is that media outlets have shot themselves in the foot by handing so many stories to their politics beat reporters instead of reporters who cover other beats and have genuine expertise in subject areas.
A health reporter can write a story on a disease outbreak so much more efficiently than a political reporter. They have the expertise to get a handle on the story quickly, plus a network of sources that don’t need a lot of time to be vetted. And a competent health reporter can write an engaging story as well which offers a clear point of view.
But when media outlets decide that the headline story is about the politics of how a health outbreak is handled, you get stories which sound like any other political story of one side vs. the other and no good resolution because the reporter lacks the knowledge and sources to know who is telling the truth.
When stories about the auto industry are handed over to political reporters, they produce inchoherent pieces about basic union issues. But labor reporters who could write effectively and efficiently get shunted off to the sidelines.
It’s easier for a bad top editor to default to sending everything to the politics desk. If an editor doesn’t have the background and intelligence to decide where assignments should go, they’ll lean toward handing a story about inflation to a political reporter like Peter Baker who thinks a single egg costs fifty cents.
Are we sure @MatthewCrawley‘s Faithful Hound is a dog?
Officials seize 750lb blind alligator from New York home
My Faithful Hound is a hound, albeit missing a few bits from when he was neutered at the shelter. But he would love the alligator, he is a friend to all.
Apparently decades ago, Floridians used to give baby alligators as gifts to people up North, or tourists brought them back home with them. My wife researched it for a book she read for her book club, Carrying Albert Home, a more-or-less fictional account that was sparked by the author’s family legend about an alligator given to his grandmother, which she then drove back to Florida once he reached about 5 feet. The gift-giving was apparently true, and people did it a good bit.
It’s one of the reasons there are legends about alligators in the New York sewers, supposedly flushed by people when they got too big.
C.H.U.D.
I thought this might be a case of editors jamming a bad headline on a good article:
Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial Performance
Nope. It’s right there in the lede:
Airline manufacturing, like baby formula, is one of a clear set of industries where this is not even close to a “thorny question.” If Boeing does not come right out and prove they will make safety their priority, there is no financial performance.
Businesses often face issues which are on an equal footing. This would be a valid framing if you were talking about a phone manufacturer weighing tradeoffs between battery life and cost. But if a reporter and her editor can’t recognize that there is such a thing as a fundamental dependency, what are they even doing?
Even if you want to frame this in business terms and set aside moral implications, there is no way to think that Boeing can treat safety as anything less that a top priority for financial reasons.
What’s weird about this story is that once you get into the details, Boeing seems to be saying they understand this. So where is the “thorny question” coming from? All the reporter cites is two unnamed sources. This is awfully thin stuff to spin a story from. Is this coming from the CEO himself? A couple of McKinsey consultants? A hostile board member? In what form is this supposed internal debate taking?
There would potentially be a story here if we even knew what it was. The universe of issues could range anywhere from a full production halt and restructuring all the way down to a little wordsmithing on a press release. Did these two unnamed sources go into any of this? Did the reporter even understand the need to ask?
…way back in the mists of time around when easyjet & ryan air started offering flights I remember reading a piece about how they’d managed to put together the cut-price deal…& (at least then) in the first instance they saved a lot of money by buying second-hand planes…probably more-than-second in practice…because they bought “write off” planes…& the reason they could pay peanuts for them was because the “design life” of the aircraft was intended to be twice the “operational lifespan”…which is to say a plane designed to be able to take the rigors of flight for a decade would be consigned to the graveyard after five years of commercial use
…that was a deliberate measure designed to ensure that cumulative stresses to the airframe that weren’t amenable to maintenance couldn’t progress to anything that might tip into catastrophic mechanical failure
…to have shit fall off a box-fresh plane?
…I think…if I try to be charitable…the suggestion that in terms of the continued viability of the business…trying to make moves on paper to keep their numbers in a window that “the market” views positively & trying to ride it out…or incurring significant costs on the balance sheet & internal upheaval to root out & fix their shit on the manufacturing side…might not be too far off the C-suite framing at boeing these days…in the uncomfortable knowledge that calling it wrong probably kills off one of the most well-established brands in the business…which is something “the economy” would take some bruising from…so there’s probably more people who’d have a vague interest in it at that sort of remove than there are people who want to know enough about boeing that it’d probably be illegal for them to buy or sell shares in the thing?
…not that I wouldn’t probably read that version if it were available…but it’d definitely be in the long tail & not the meaty part of the bell-curve on the attention/retention metrics, would be my guess
Well, it’s a thorny issue for Republicans, and for most C-suiters because they’re all a bunch of greedy, soulless fucks who prioritize money above everything else to the point where they cannot possibly fathom the reality that profit is a byproduct of making responsible decisions that might cost an extra few bucks on the front end. Nope, as far as these assholes are concerned, the bottom line is the only thing that matters, so the easiest way to pump that bottom line is exactly what they will do every single time. It’s why we have data which shows that companies that do things like prioritize employee engagement, or making sure they have a well-diversified executive staff, generally are much more profitable than the companies that abuse their employees and who see “diversity” as a drag on the bottom line. But none of that matters to the Boeings and Amazons and Wal-Marts of the world because they would much rather be right than be happy.
Even Vlad won’t give him a loan?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/18/trump-cant-secure-454-million-appeal-bond-in-new-york-fraud-case-his-lawyers-say.html
Yeah, good luck with that sucker…
https://www.newsweek.com/rudy-giuliani-said-loyalty-donald-trump-help-heaven-1880128
Finally, truth in advertising!
…from that first one…& let me add “ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-ho-merry-christmas”
…somebody correct me if I’m wrong…but I believe the idea with a bond is that if you don’t go that route the actual cash you have to post is higher than the stated figure from the verdict by some percentage…so even with the fees & the bondsman getting their cut…the outlay is lower if you take the bond…in net terms it costs you less
…but whatever that calculation is it doesn’t say to post cash you need double the stated number…so…if I’ve got that part right…he not only doesn’t “have” in a place it’s legal to take it from for that purpose…the half-billion-plus that he’d need to go the cash route…& four brokers & 30 concerns who make this their business later…the best offers he can get to put up the bond cost him significantly more than if he put it up out of his own pocket
…I’d be comfortable assuming that he’s overstating the costs in his usual fudge-the-numbers-to-skew-the-outcome routine…but what he’s saying seems to boil down to “I don’t have the money & I can’t get the money without it costing me more money than I can lay my hands on”
…& that…frankly…is music to my ears…so I sincerely hope it is absolutely true even with the actual numbers plugged in to the calculation?
In first world problems, I scheduled a massage and facial at a MassageLuxe yesterday to use up the last credits I had from cancelling my membership.
The esthetician offered the dermaplane upsell. I get this from my real esthetician, it’s fine. They use a scalpel to scrape your face gently and remove peach fuzz and dead skin cells. It’s not hard. She really was scraping at odd angles along my brow line and ahh this morning I have razorburn in the stylization of “someone wanted to draw an angry unibrow on my face” 🤣
where did you get that picture of me
The resemblance is uncanny, right down to the scowl on my face during this meeting.
😆😂😂😂🤣
The UAW has gotten 70% of the workers at a VW plant in Tennessee to sign on to a union organizing effort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/business/volkswagen-uaw-union-chattanooga.html
This was reported by someone who has covered the auto industry for two decades, by the way. You know if this had gone to the politics desk, the framing would be “here’s why this is bad news for Biden.”
So much for deliberately locating your factory in a Right To Fuck Your Workers Over state.